“Better than the farm, Ciro?”

The big man looked around him at the bodies. It had been the hardest day of his life, but he knew the men around him better than he could explain. He had been alone on the farm.

“Yes, sir,” he said, and Julius seemed to understand.

Chapter 39

                  CHAPTER 39                  

Suetonius leaned on the fence in the woods. At the edge of his vision, he saw his father’s slaves working unhurriedly to uproot the posts and remove the boundary. In a few hours all signs of it would be gone, and Suetonius frowned as he rested his head on his arms. The house he had planned would have been beautiful, rising above the trees on Caesar’s land to look down the hill. He had been going to have a balcony built so that he could sit there on warm evenings with a cool drink. All that had vanished with his father’s sudden weakness.

Suetonius picked at a splinter on the post, thinking of the host of petty insults that Julius had forced him to accept when they were prisoners and with the Wolves in Greece. He knew if Julius hadn’t been there, the other men would have accepted him more readily, perhaps even agreeing to his command in the end as they had for Julius. He would have handed over the body of Mithridates to the legate Lepidus, sharing a meal with the man rather than rushing off to the port with barely a pause. The Senate would have named him tribune and his father would have been proud.

Instead, he had nothing but a ransom that belonged to his father and a few scars to show for everything he had endured. Caesar had taken the Wolves away to the north, flattering and persuading them to follow him, while Suetonius was left behind, without even the small comfort of seeing his own house built.

He tore at the splinter in sudden anger, wincing as part of it scored the skin of his hand. He had applied to go north with the six legions, but none of the legates had accepted him. No doubt who had spread the word there. He knew his father could have called in favors for them to accept his son, but had stopped short of asking. The shame of how he had been treated burned at him in the stillness of the woods.

Another movement caught his eye and he raised his head to see. He almost hoped some of his father’s slaves were shirking their work. The flogging he would give them would go some way to break the lethargy he felt. He seemed to feel life more strongly in his veins when the time came to punish the lazy ones. He knew they walked in fear of him, but that was only right.